Initial Thoughts on WWDC ’07 Keynote

I am right on the heals of hearing Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, wrap up this years WWDC keynote. I have to say that while the keynote didn’t introduce any big-ticket items that some Mac fans were looking for, I think it was what everyone realistically thought would happen. The biggest and most pleasant surprise came right out of the gate when EA Games announced that it will be bringing some of its most popular titles to the Mac, including EA Sports favorites starting in August. Steve continued on into Leopard, and like last year, showed 10 new features coming in the new version of OS X. He unveiled the sleek new desktop and finder, which all appear to be big gains; but, both are more or less eye candy. A new previewing feature called Quick look was introduced and that also looks very nice. Beyond that, nothing ‘new’ was really shown about Leopard. Steve Jobs re-outlined the features shown at last year’s WWDC.

Once the 10 features were covered, Jobs announced that Apple’s Safari has grown to nearly 5% of the browser market share. Furthermore, Apple plans to port Safari fully over to Windows XP/Vista. This should be very interesting and Steve announced that a beta of Safari 3 for Windows and OS X Tiger will be available today via www.apple.com/safari

Finally, ‘one more thing …’

Apple announced that it will open developers to the iPhone via Safari. Meaning that developers will be able to develop applications for iPhone using the latest in web standards within iPhone’s Safari browser. This news proved to be unpleasing to most developers, who wanted all out control to develop more client style apps for Apple’s much anticipated phone.

I will post more on this soon as possible but so far, this keynote is exactly what many expected. Sure, the games and Safari news was a surprised, but both are definite positives for Apple. While developers appear to be unpleased, I think it is not a decision that Apple wanted to make but had to because of AT&T. Much like Apple is puppeted with iTunes and DRM. Steve Jobs is all about healthy partnerships and he knows that forcing too much can hurt those partnerships. Apple also realizes that web development is a hot thing right now and is really where things are headed. So, this development move does not surprise or even upset me.